Bi Shumin is one of the most unusual and powerful female writers in China’s current literatary scene. She has created very influential works, writing almost 4 million words and has won more than 30 prizes both at home and abroad since the late 1980s.
Amazingly, she Was able to move from medicine When she created her first works in 1987, she was already 35 years old. She joined the army when she was 16 and practiced medicine for 22 years. She is much like writers Lu Xun and Guo Moruo, who also gave up medical science for the pen.
Bi Shumin’s uncommon life experiences have given her works distinctive characteristics and endowed her with perspectives both as a writer and as a doctor. She also possesses unique insights that can grasp both mental and physical essence, courage, broad mindedness and merciful sentiments that are difficult for many writers, and a mission and responsibility that regards it as her own duty to heal the wounded and rescue the dead while curing sickness to save patients.
What Tibet Gives
From the very beginning her nature has been to be interested in other people, envisioning them as fascinating and mysterious. The nature of her writing is also to talk about people, about the connections between people and nature, and people and the universe.
Literature is the study of people. When Bi was a high school student in Beijing — just a little older than 16 — she had to leave school and join the army.
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Writer Bi Shumin at a book signing of her latest work Save the Breast.
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Recalling her army experience in Tibet, Bi said, “I was sent to northern Tibet, maybe because I was in good health, and our unit was stationed at a juncture between a group of mountains at an elevation of 5,000 metres. To a 16-year-old girl, 35 years ago, it was an intense shock to be totally cut off from the world. It felt like Mars, like the earth had only recently solidified, without a scrap of human habitation.”
Bi stayed there for 11 years. “While I was there, Tibet’s environment had a great influence on my future writing. At night you saw the stars — they were enormous. During the day you saw the endless wilderness and you thought for a thousand years, for 10 thousand years, all this has been perfectly self-sufficient. A life of 100 years is insignificant to these mountains. I came away from this with the intense feeling that life is fleeting, and precious — not only my own, but other peoples. ”
Bi said after she returned to Beijing, she wanted to tell everyone what she had learned in Tibet. So she discovered writing.
“Although every one of my books is different, this is the one thing that doesn’t change: the sense of solicitude for other people. Now I run a psychological clinic, and in some ways the impulses that drove me to write are the same ones that brought me here: an interest in the workings of people’s souls and a desire to help them,” Bi said.
She also tries to encourage young people to cherish life, to have the same sense of purpose that living in Tibet gave her. “I try, both through my work and my writing Appointed Death (Yuyue Siwang) to overcome the Eastern taboos against talking about death, and to help people see it as a natural thing,” Bi stated.
Physician-turned-writer
In 1969 Bi Shumin was sent to Tibet as an army medic in the PLA and stayed there for 11 years. Her writing career began in 1987 with the publication of Death in Kunlun (Kunlun Shang), a fictional novella based on those experiences. She was a doctor for 22 years, now acts as vice-chairman of the Beijing Writers Association, and opened a psychological clinic more than a year ago. She has written all her life.
Bi travels in the fields of medicine and literature, and is a unique person in Chinese literary world. She pays close attention to her writing objects from the perspectives both as a writer and as a doctor. She grasps clearly the essence of life from all aspects, such as physiology, psychology, ethics and morals; she focuses on medical themes and develops a school of her own because of her medical contents and narrative performance. 
Life and Death
Bi was one of the representatives for “New Experience Writing,” a literary school that originated in 1993 in Beijing and claims that the writers’ personal experiences should be the foundation for literary writing. “A writer needs some reasons to write a novel. For my own part, my experience two decades ago has fostered a keen interest in human beings. While writing, I always pay special attention to life and death, which is the persistent theme of my novels,” said the writer.
And her latest novel Save the Breast is no exception. The novel is about several breast cancer patients, and a psychologist who unites the patients and offers them support. Facing the threat of death, the patients are also experiencing mental crises. Some are discriminated against after the surgical removal of their breasts, some develop split personalities and some lose their zest for life and their belief in true love.
（Source: chinaculture.org）
